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The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi

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Published/Copyright: July 4, 2018
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Frontiers of Narrative Studies
From the journal Frontiers of Narrative Studies Volume 4 Issue 1

Abstract

Chevillard’s novel L’Auteur et moi (2012) touches on a problem which is paradigmatic for contemporary French prose (and perhaps “postmodern” literature in general), namely the problem of literary authenticity. Are the “unnatural” dimensions of this novel – especially its persistent irony, its playful rejection of generic norms and its attacks on the interpretative authority of its readers – playful but futile devices which lack any authentic narrative concern? Or do they represent a topical and authentic answer to the challenges of an “exhausted” genre? The present paper elaborates on this question by analysing, on the one hand, the “unnatural” (and simultaneously highly comical) devices of the novel in detail. This analysis is centred, firstly, on Chevillard’s multifaceted parody on the conventions of both narrative and non-narrative (argumentative, lyrical, scientific) discourse and, secondly, on the ways in which the novel provokes and challenges professional readers – both by the subversive use of literary-theoretical categories (author; narrator; implied author) and by the anticipation and depreciation of its own hermeneutic reception. On the other hand, this paper interprets Chevillard’s novel as the expression of an authentic literary effort which manifests itself not in the narrative contents, but in the novel’s “unnatural” composition, which offers three exits from the generic impasse with which the present-day French novel struggles.

Keywords: autofictionality; eventfulness; experientiality; implied author; irony; postmodernism; unnaturalness

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Published Online: 2018-07-04
Published in Print: 2018-06-28

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Introduction
  4. When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology
  5. The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi
  6. Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan
  7. We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?
  8. Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
  9. Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap
  10. The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
  11. Forum: Sacrificial narratives
  12. Sacrificial narratives: Conversation from multiple perspectives
  13. Reversed ventriloquism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sacrificial narrative
  14. The concept of “bare life” in camp literature
  15. The Serbian mythomoteur as sacrificial narrative
  16. The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative
  17. The poetic sacrifice: Cultural saints and literary nation building
  18. Mnemonic battles over the NATO bombing of Serbia – analysis and critique
https://doi.org/10.1515/fns-2018-0003
Keywords for this article
autofictionality; eventfulness; experientiality; implied author; irony; postmodernism; unnaturalness

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Introduction
  4. When not to tell stories: Unnatural narrative in applied narratology
  5. The “unnatural” French novel of today: Éric Chevillard’s L’Auteur et moi
  6. Your body is our black box: Narrating nations in second-person fiction by Edna O’Brien and Jennifer Egan
  7. We narration in Chang-rae Lee’s On such a full sea and Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the attic: “Unnaturally” Asian American?
  8. Re-imagining first-person narrative as a collective voice in John Edgar Wideman’s Sent for you yesterday
  9. Nonlinearity and focalisation in Attila Janisch’s Másnap
  10. The world that wasn’t there: Interstitial ontological spaces in contemporary video games
  11. Forum: Sacrificial narratives
  12. Sacrificial narratives: Conversation from multiple perspectives
  13. Reversed ventriloquism: Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s sacrificial narrative
  14. The concept of “bare life” in camp literature
  15. The Serbian mythomoteur as sacrificial narrative
  16. The Zrinski-Frankopan conspiracy as a national sacrificial narrative
  17. The poetic sacrifice: Cultural saints and literary nation building
  18. Mnemonic battles over the NATO bombing of Serbia – analysis and critique
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